Loyalty in eSports

In my two years in the eSports journalism world I've noticed one thing about the people in it: they don’t care about growing an organization, and they have no sense of loyalty. I spent my entire “career” at Insideresports.com and I'd still be in it if school didn’t start to actually be difficult. I liked the idea - bring back objectivity back to eSports journalism and try not to kiss the ass of the established organizations. That and the marketing BS “CONNECTING ALL GAMERS.” However my fellow journalists didn’t seem to have the same connect to the idea.

For example within the first two months one of the major founders left the organizations to a rival organizations FOR THE EXACT SAME POSITION. And then of the original staff of about 20 we decreased to about 5 within the same period. Most of the staffers left to join compLexity, Evil Geniuses, Fnatic, Sk-gaming and all equally had about the same tenure with those organizations - about 2 maybe 3 months.

And it’s not like i don’t know the deals they were given - i had be approached by the same organizations to cover their respective teams but the contract they offered me were effectively the same as one i had with Insider eSports except they had the words “Evil Geniuses” or “Fnatic” on them.

But the biggest blow to the simple growth of the org was how bad the “marketing” and “streaming” people were in terms of ethics. Every time we signed a marketing person to the organization - and I'm almost certain that some these people were paid out of Peawok’s pocket -
would take the credibility we had to sponsors, have the sponsors sign deals with themselves and then go off and form their own companies and basically leech off our limited success. This happened numerous times over the course of the two years. The streaming people would do the same things, except i know they took seed money from Peawok for their equipment.

So you might ask “why are you complaining about this now when you have left the organization and effectively left the scene all together?” Well first i had a contract that i couldn't talk about the inner workings of IE until after about a year since i left the organization. Second it’s been bothering me for a long time. I’ve grown up in and around tech start ups my entire life. They always talked about “developing a culture” and “trying to provide the best product for the consumer.” And those things don't’ seem to be in the eSports world. The culture in eSports is “me first, fuck objectivity, fuck developing anything” and the product is an article which is not then not doing anything for the next few months until you are finished finalizing your contract with the next organization. And then the cycle repeats itself.

Furthermore it seems like some of the people who are in eSports don’t actually care about eSports or developing it but instead they seem much more interested in simply using it to move up the corporate ladder. They start organizations, build connections with sponsors and once they are big enough - and instead of moving the organization to profitability - they simply jump ship to the corporate sponsor. Or Stream service they were using. Or work in some other tech company.

And because of this we have a very unstable scene, where we don’t know which organizations are legitimate and which are simple cash grabs which are created to stroke the founders ego before he jumps off with a golden parachute to a comfy seat in an office building somewhere.